The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks Page A

had been asking themselves for days. And their failure had not passed their notice, either.
    Teia said nothing, though, and walked past with her head down.
    Despite that the Lily’s Stem was covered in a dome of blue and yellow luxin, translucent and insanely strong, Teia walked for twenty or thirty paces before she took off her hood. The tide was rising, and the wind was causing whitecaps. The Lily’s Stem crossed the waterline, so now the waves were smashing against the bridge, which didn’t so much as shudder. It was a symbol of the Chromeria itself. All the tumult and the roar of the world crested and smashed against it, and it stood, unchanged, unmoved, impervious.
    It was always eerie, though, walking through the light-tunnel, watching bursts of water flare high over your head, sometimes crashing all the way over the tube. There had been attempts to blow the bridge before with barrels of black powder. At least three attempts had been stopped. One wagon had made it, the Tellari separatist inside bleeding, dying from his wounds even as he maniacally set fire to his cargo.
    The explosion, confined to the tube, had blasted out both sides like a musket firing two directions. Dozens had died, and yet the bridge held. Ahhana the Dextrous had been the superchromat yellow drafter who’d been the lead drafter creating the bridge, more than two hundred years ago. There were engineers even now who claimed succession down a line of tutors to the woman, so famous had she been.
    Teia tried to remind herself of that strength when a wave smashed against the side and washed all the way over the top.
    She avoided the others: Ferkudi and some of his friends from the earlier Blackguard classes. For a moment as they laughed, though, happy, not two minutes after grieving and being ready to fight, Teia saw them as her instructors must: children, sixteen and seventeen years old, laughing about someone’s awkward attempts at kissing, and yet warriors at the same moment, lethal and lazy, implacable and silly, man and child.
    Too much thinking, T.
    She somehow made it into the lift without them noticing her among the others. It was a good thing about being slight. Sometimes you wanted to be overlooked. She didn’t feel like talking, but she wondered if they’d think her unfriendly. No, they were too involved with themselves.
    Staying on the lift when the inductees got out, Teia left instead at the level of Kip’s room. The clerks had been too busy in the days immediately before the fleet left to do any normal business. That had meant Teia and Kip couldn’t file her paperwork. It meant she was still, technically, a slave. With Kip gone, she needed to file that paperwork immediately. If old Andross Guile remembered her, he would surely seize her as his grandson’s property, if only to spite Kip.
    You idiot, Kip, why’d you attack Andross Guile? Of all people, you attack him ?
    And where was Kip now? Would he ever come home?
    Come home? To where Andross Guile and a noose are waiting for him?
    Kip could be alive, but Teia would still probably never see him again. He’d been her partner for only a few months, but their time together had been intense. They’d been outcasts together, and fought together, both figuratively and literally. Teia’s heart ached.
    She tugged on the vial of olive oil she still wore at her neck. She would wear it until she got the confirmation from the secretaries that her manumission papers had gone through fully, irrevocably. Then she would smash it. Soon, she hoped.
    The key turned easily in the lock, and Teia opened the door and stepped inside quickly.
    “Hello, little dove,” a man said from the darkness. “Turn around.”
    Teia froze up for a moment, then turned, keeping a hand on the latch. “Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
    “Two … excellent … questions,” the man said. He had fair skin, freckles, a fringe of orange hair brushed over in a vain attempt to conceal a knobby